Beside weathered wooden beams and jagged steel tools, dozens of supporters of Little Lady, the sole remaining wooden fishing dragger in New England, gathered to hear updates as she nears full restoration.
Little Lady is set to be moved to the Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway for repairs in about a month from her current location at Ralph Packer’s dock in Vineyard Haven. But there’s still a gap of $150,000 needed for the $1.5 million total restoration. She’s a generational vessel with a storied past that spans almost a hundred years and remains a landmark in the historic fishing village of Menemsha.
After restoration, Little Lady is slated to become an educational hub for younger generations at the docks, and any fish caught from the net that drags beside her across the ocean floor will be donated to local food pantries. Co-founder of Gannon and Benjamin, Nat Benjamin, said on Friday, that Little Lady is an “iconic vessel that’s been in Mememsha for many generations.” “We’re trying to keep her there,” he added.
The boat was purchased by the Martha’s Vineyard Fishermen’s Preservation Trust (MVFPT) last year, although the former owner of Little Lady, Dennis (“Denny”) Jason Jr., will continue to be her captain after the restoration is finished. The project is funded by private donors and through Community Preservation Act funds from Tisbury and Chilmark.
Shelley Edmundson, the executive director of MVFPT, said Little Lady is a symbol of the vast working waterfront community in Vineyard Haven, which includes ship repair workers, boat builders, fishermen and women, and a fuel station.
“We’re usually on the docks covered in fish scales, and then you have Gannon and Benjamin here on the waterfront covered in sawdust, and we’re all working really hard to keep our working waterfronts working in different ways,” Edmundson said.
She said Little Lady “symbolizes a wooden boat craftsmanship that is so lively and strong here.”
Little Lady was built in Noank, Conn. in 1929 by Captain Earl Foster and Oren Olds. Her original name was Mary F.
Edmundson and Jason were able to get in touch with Foster’s family, who said the captain built her on the side of his family home, where he was raising 13 children with his wife. According to the family, the boat became so enmeshed in their home that when she was completed, they moved the whole family to the woodshed, demolished the house, and dragged Little Lady to the shore.
By the 1950s, Little Lady was sold to Jason’s grandfather, who fine-tuned the vessel into a fishing dragger. She stayed in the Jason family and became so intertwined with the up-Island fishing village of Menemsha that paintings and photographs featuring Little Lady, with her red and green accented hull, ladders up the center mast, and number and name splashed in white paint across the side, cover local galleries.
Christian Cabral, who manages the operations and business side of Gannon and Benjamin, outlined the next steps for Little Lady. He told the crowd on Friday that materials have begun to be procured, and the team plans to move Little Lady from the Packer docks to the Gannon and Benjamin workshop next month.
The next steps for the vessel include an estimated repair or replacement of about 80 percent of the hull, engine, and other parts, all while keeping the character of Little Lady alive. It’s a complicated process that involves significant planning, Cabral said.
“Restoration, in its broadest sense, is taking an existing object … with what now has historic providence, looking at that object, deciding what we need to preserve, how we need to preserve it, and the methodology to take care of it,” Cabral said. “This is our guiding principle. This is where we start. To put it bluntly, is the object worth saving?”
Cabral, the Gannon and Benjamin team, and those involved in Little Lady’s past, present, and future, believe she is.
“Denny and his family, all the community members that go down to Menemsha and get the ice cream at the Galley and see that boat sitting there. The feeling of Martha’s Vineyarders, who’ve made their money from the water — building boats and fishing — were downstream directly of that lineage. The feeling includes being on board the boat, taking kids out on the water. Those are all worthwhile things that we have the opportunity to preserve,” Cabral said.
